This makes Lula difficult to spot.Ģ) Lula is rarely lytic at 37Â✬, the temperature at which E. So what's Lula's secret? Well, Lula has five secrets, actually: 1) When Lula infects a cell, it enters lysogeny much faster than other phage. During this process, Lula has a difficult balancing act: Lula not only has to reproduce enough phage particles so that it won't go extinct during the transfer, it also has to not become noticed (if it is, the researcher will destroy the culture, and no more Lula). When it infects a new cell, and then is induced to become lysogenic (when lysogenic, the phage is quiescent, does not produce viral particles, and only replicates when the bacterium divides), the previous host's DNA is now in the newly infected cell. Basically, P1, when it enters infectious mode (known as lysis or the lytic phase), will sometimes take up some of its previous host's DNA. coli K-12, the ubiquitous lab strain and workhorse of molecular genetics, already contains a phage, Lambda, against which Lula has to compete.ģ) Researchers often use another phage, P1, in a process known as transduction. To be successful, Lula faces several problems:ġ) It has to successfully hide from researchers who don't want this phage mucking up their experiments.Ģ) E. In short, the article describes the discovery of a bacteriophage ('phage')-a bacterial virus-that is very well suited for survival and spread in microbiology laboratories. When I first saw the title of this PloSOne article, " Unauthorized Horizontal Spread in the Laboratory Environment: The Tactics of Lula, a Temperate Lambdoid Bacteriophage of Escherichia coli", I thought, "Hunh?!? You can actually publish articles about laboratory contamination?", but it's actually a very interesting article.
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